Next on our list of the foundational five is vitamin D. I've done videos on vitamin D in the past. Please go find them. Um, they're gonna have more information than I can put in this video here, but I'm gonna give you kind of a, a, a rapid overview on vitamin D. So, vitamin D, anti-inflammatory, anti autoimmune, immune regulating, anti-cancer, um, not directly, but helps our body do all these things, right? It supports our body's natural mechanisms for doing all these things. Um, so very important to have. It's generally considered the most, if not in the top two. Uh, magnesium being the other, uh, nutritional deficiencies in our bodies. Uh, we make vitamin D from the sun. Sun has to hit our skin, not really showing your skin there and interact with cholesterol. And that makes the first conversion that it has to go to the liver, get converted to the kidneys, get converted, then you finally get active vitamin D.

(00:58)
So it's a multi-step process. Um, and there's a certain amount of, of data that says that if you expose yourself to the sun, even if you start the process, well, it can take six or eight hours to absorb that vitamin D into your body so it can go on and make the other conversions. And when you go inside and take a shower and wash that off, you've lost it. You also have a surface area issue. We were kind of designed to wander around largely naked, which I don't recommend in this day and age. Um, and, and now when we do go outside, we're, we're clothed, um, and covered. And, uh, that's when we're outside. The rest of the time we're inside and we're kind of insulated from that sunlight. When you're in your vehicle, you've got tinted windows, you've got UV protected, uh, windows in your buildings.

(01:48)
So we, our exposure is much less than it ever was before. Um, and both in surface area and time. And then, you know, as we wash it off, when we do meaningfully expose ourselves, that that reduces our intake as well. So that's partly why we're so deficient in vitamin D. Now, how do you know if you're deficient in Vitamin D? Simple blood test? Um, I tell people all the time, they say, how much vitamin D do I need or, or should I be taking vitamin D? Yes, you should probably be taking vitamin D as far as what dosage. I have no idea until I see a blood test. I shouldn't say I have no idea. It's difficult to say without seeing a blood test. Now, 2000 IUs a day, and I'm talking about adults here for a minute, 2000 IUs a day of vitamin D safe for basically everybody.

(02:39)
The chances that you're gonna overdose yourself on vitamin D at 2000 units a day, infant decimal, right? But is it gonna be a meaningful dose? Will it increase your vitamin D levels? Will it make a difference? That's debatable. 2000 IUs is not a dosage i I normally use, except with children 5,000 IUs a day. That's a dose that's likely to be meaningful and also likely to be safe, right? But depending on how deficient you are, is that really the right dose? Do you need 10,000 or 15,000 IU for a period of time to get you up to where you need to be? Um, or is 5,000 likely to handle it? I don't know, without seeing a blood test. So there are some safe ranges to start with, um, but you really don't know if it's gonna make the difference you need until you do a blood test.

(03:33)
So the blood test is called a 25 hydroxy vitamin D, and that's kind of written out 25 parentheses o h, vitamin D. Um, so that's the test you need to ask for from your, from your doctor. Obviously we're happy to do it for you here if you call the office. Um, but you're gonna get a result from that, that the lab says you should be between 30 and 100, and they're not necessarily wrong in the 30 to 50 range you are handling, for the most part your mineral absorption issues. Are you going to be able to absorb enough minerals to protect your bone density in that 30 to 50 range? Probably, right? But that's about it. All of the other benefits you read about with vitamin D generally happen at blood levels above 55. So to me, in my office, that's kind of the first cutoff.

(04:26)
I want everybody to get to a blood level above 55. Now, for people who have a known inflammatory condition in autoimmune condition, their cancer patients, um, or they've got some significant immune challenge, um, those patients need to be between 70 and 90 on the blood test or between 70 and 100 on the blood test. Um, and so if you come in here and you're, and you say, can I take some vitamin D and I put you on 5,000 a day, if we do a test and your blood levels are 12, it's gonna take forever for 5,000 a day to make a difference. If your levels are 12 and you're blowing up with rheumatoid arthritis, why need to give you 10 or 15 unit thousand units a day until we get you up into that 50, 60, 70, 80 range, then we can back off to five or 10 for maintenance.

(05:20)
But if you come in and say, Hey, do I need to take vitamin D? And your levels are already in the mid forties and you don't really have anything much going on, then 5,000 a day is probably a great dose for you. It'll get you above 55 into the 65 or 70 range and you're fine, right? So, so the, the amount on your blood work matters. Now, can you safely supplement without knowing it? Probably 2000, 5,000 units a day as an adult, likely that's fine for you. It is a fat soluble vitamin. You can get too much, but too much is kind of a debatable amount. Um, I routinely have patients who will get themselves up into the a hundred, a hundred ten, a hundred twenty, a hundred thirty range. The highest I've ever seen was 300, not by my direction. Um, but she was fine. Like she wasn't having side effects of all this.

(06:10)
Now, was she wasting money on vitamin D? Likely so, but, but she wasn't in any trouble at 300. It was just like, wow, how'd you do that? Okay, let's, you know, we'll back off a little bit. Um, there are people who have, um, some mutations to vitamin D receptors and if you've done certain genetic testing, um, not that I'm saying you have to go out and do that, but some people have and they know that they have a, um, a deficiency or a malformation of their vitamin D receptors, those people likely need to stay up in the upper end, 90 to 120 to get the benefits that the rest of us would get in that 70 to 90 range. Um, but the research does get a little bit fuzzy at that point. Um, a great person to follow to get really good vitamin D information, um, is Dr.

(07:01)
Mercola. You can also get some good vitamin D information from Alex Vasquez. Um, those are, those are two people. Uh, they're on ck uh, they're also on, um, I believe they're on Rumble. I don't even know if they're on YouTube or Facebook anymore. I think they've been taken off of there because they're saying truthful stuff about vitamin D in your immune system. Covid, um, the politics of Covid took a lot of really good, um, sources of information off of the mainstream social media sites and kind of threw them over onto, uh, places like Rumble and CK and places like that. They're still there. You just have to work a little bit harder to get the information. Um, but anyway, so vitamin D levels can make a big difference in your dosage. Now supplementation, yes, you can get out in the sun and you can meaningfully expose yourself to some sun.

(07:55)
You want what's called a sub arial dose, meaning get out of the sun before you turn pink. That's basically the goal. Now for people like my wife who's a redhead, she is white. Um, and I say that lovingly, but she can only spend, I mean this time of the summer, it's what, late July here she can only spend 10 or 15 minutes unprotected in the sun before she starts to turn pink. So her dosage of sunlight is probably 10 minutes at a time and then she's gotta cover up for me. I'm a darker complected person compared to her. I can probably spend 30 minutes, 40 minutes out in the sun before I really need to start protecting myself. Um, there are other people darker than me that can spend hours out in the sun. So you kind of have to know your own, uh, limitations.

(08:40)
But exposing yourself mid-morning, um, maybe early afternoon, 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, depending on what you can tolerate three or four times a week will help your vitamin D levels. Is that going to be enough to dig you out of a hole? I have not found that to be the case. Is it going to be enough to maintain you once you've gotten out of that hole potentially? Is it enough that you can lower your supplementation while you're getting that exposure? Yes, almost always. Um, but then during the winter months or times when you're not gonna be able to be exposed as much, then you go back on your supplementation at a more robust level. I just recommend once you get it where you want it, check your vitamin D levels at least a couple of times a year on the way up. You can check 'em once a quarter, uh, and kind of see where you are.

(09:23)
But once you've gotten 'em established, check 'em every six months, no big deal. There are other things you can check along with them. Your functional medicine doctor will guide you on that. Or if I'm your functional medicine doctor, ask me. Um, and we'll get that taken care of for you, but that's an appropriate interval. Now, outside of exposure, um, let's talk about supplementation. There are two main ways, I guess three that I supplement. Vitamin D, capsules and liquids. Those are two ways, uh, within each of those. You have vitamin D with vitamin K and vitamin D without vitamin K. So the most common vitamin D product we use here is something from designs for health, um, called Vitamin D Supreme. Now with vitamin D, Supreme, uh, or we just call it D Supreme at the office, um, it's 5,000 units international units of vitamin D per capsule.

(10:15)
And these are like mini capsules. They're about half the size of a regular capsule of anything. Um, and it's got 5,000 IU vitamin D and it's got a little bit of vitamin K in with it. So let me tell you what vitamin K does. Many times you'll hear doctors tell you if you take too much vitamin D, you're gonna calcify your arteries cuz it just, it pulls in all this vitamin D or the all this calcium from the digestive tract and then it floods your vascular system with it and your body doesn't know what to do with it and it's gonna calcify the arteries and it's gonna kill you. Um, no. So a couple things missing from that. First of all, it can only get out of your digestive tract. What you take in. Like it's not gonna create calcium in your digestive tract, right?

(10:56)
You, you would have to take massive amounts of calcium along with the vitamin D to facilitate that process. Um, there are times when you can get a lot of extra calcium in your bloodstream. That usually involves something called parathyroid hormone, which pulls calcium out of your bones, it goes to your bank account for calcium and makes withdrawals from that and fills your bloodstream up with it. That's a significant problem. Um, but as far as bringing it in from the digestive tract, it's not gonna bring in more calcium than you take in, right? So that's not likely to be a problem. And the calcium that it brings in, um, vitamin D is kind of the u p s driver that brings the calcium to your house and sets it on your front doorstep, rings the doorbell and drives off. You could stack up some packages on the front doorstep.

(11:45)
I get the logic there. Vitamin K is is your butler that goes to the front door and brings those packages inside where they're safe. So in your system with vitamin D and calcium, vitamin D brings it in from the digestive tract and gets it into the bloodstream in a usable form. Vitamin K gets it from the bloodstream and takes it onto the, the final uh, destination where it's needed be that bones or something metabolic. Um, that's what vitamin K does. So if you take vitamin D, especially in higher dosages, 10, 15,000 units a day, having vitamin K with it becomes more important because then you can actually use whatever calcium's coming in. Um, vitamin K also seems to help vitamin D with its anti-inflammatory and kind of immune modulating effects. Um, but that's a little bit fuzzier in the research. So important to have some vitamin K with your vitamin D.

(12:39)
Not everybody can take vitamin K, some people are on blood thinners and their doctors have told them don't take any vitamin K. So we do have vitamin D available without the vitamin K personal opinion, as long as the vitamin K you're taking is very regimented, you take the same amount every day all the time, they can adjust your blood thinners to that. Um, and everything should be fine, but a lot of doctors are very skittish about doing that. Even with me sometimes when I try to communicate to the other doctor that hey, we're doing this, it's gonna be a regular dose, it's not gonna change, you know, adjust their, their blood thinners as necessary, they don't want to do it. They just, no, no, no, no, don't take that, don't take that. But now you're denying the patient appropriate blood levels of vitamin D and that's opening up a whole nother, um, can of worms for that patient that increases risk of all kinds of other things.

(13:26)
So I disagree with that. That's why we use vitamin D without vitamin K in those cases. We just don't normally use really high doses. We're more patient in bringing their levels up. We try to get them to get more sun exposure to augment that. We have to go about it a little bit differently when we can't use the vitamin K with it. Now, um, liquids, uh, oh, sorry, we have a, the D Supreme is the designs for health with the vitamin K, um, 5,000 units of capsule. We have a D three 5,000 from a different brand that's not available on our website. You'd have to call the office for that. That's the one without vitamin K. Then we have liquids. Uh, and I don't think these liquids have vitamin K in them either. Um, so be aware of that. Uh, we use the liquids more often in kids because they can't swallow capsules.

(14:12)
Um, and the thing you need to know about liquids is they basically come in two different concentrations. You can get a liquid vitamin D, they're all emulsified and, and um, liposomal vitamin D, it's very easy to absorb. The technology has gotten better on that. Um, but you can get vitamin D that is dosed per drop in vitamin D, that's dosed per dropper, which is usually one milliliter. Um, so you'll find them either 2000 or 5,000 IUs per drop or 2000 or 5,000 IUs per dropper. Make sure you know which one you're getting. If you've got the

5,000 IUs per drop and you are giving a dropper, you're giving massive amounts of vitamin D in the short run. It's not gonna hurt anybody, but you don't wanna do that long term. If you've got one that is dosed, um, per dropper and you're giving it per drop, you're wasting your time. You're giving a 10th of the dose every time you give it. Um, so just make sure you read the label and know what you're getting. Those are the two ways they typically come. We use one, um, here that is an emulsified high potency vitamin D. It's 5,000 IUs per drop. Uh, and then we have the one that's 5,000 IUs per dropper. Uh, when we don't have to go that, that aggressive with it, uh, we do have some adults that take it. There are some adults that when they take the capsule, their levels just don't come up and, and they'll come into me generally already knowing that sometimes that involves a magnesium deficiency and some other things that are kind of nuanced with it, but while we're working on those, we'll switch them to a liquid and see if we get better absorption and better action out of it that way.

(15:51)
So every once in a while, if you're someone that says, well, gosh, I've taken vitamin D before, it's never worked for me. Try, try a liquid and, and you may find that you absorb and and utilize that, um, a little bit differently. But like I said, a lot of times the liquids don't come with vitamin K. So we don't normally do high doses of those, we just do a lower dose, longer period of time and encourage more sun exposure along with it. But remember with sun exposure, if you are taking a statin drug that is dropping your cholesterol levels down to ridiculous levels, whole nother video, um, you won't really be able to make use of the sunlight and uh, and probably have some trouble with it. Also, uh, for what it's worth, seed oils. If you have a diet high in vegetable oil, canola oil, margarine seed oils, um, these kind of industrial inflammatory oils, you will sunburn so much more quickly than when your diet is high in natural fats like beef tallow, fish oil, avocado oil, um, olive oil, those kinds of things, those fats, even coconut oil, those fats are much more stable and they don't lead to, um, sun burning nearly as easily.

(17:03)
That's one of the considerations in thinking, um, why our, why we are so much more sensitive to the sun now than we used to be. Like we used to be able to walk around naked all day long out in the sun and we weren't all dying of skin cancer right? Now, granted, some of us were dying from savor tooth tigers before the skin cancer would've gotten us, but as our in, as our intake of seed oils has increased over the years, our risk of cancers of all kinds, but definitely skin cancers and how easily we burn and how much sunscreen we need has increased over time as well. Um, and there seems to be this perception that like the sun has gotten hotter and more intense and all that, but you can't discount the fact that we are now eating oils that are inherently unstable.

(17:49)
Um, and, and not at all what we were supposed to be building our cell membranes out of. And so if you want to use sun exposure to get more of your vitamin D levels, get off the seed oils, get off the canola oil, get off the margarine and the shortenings and all of those, they're in everything you buy at the store, right? Unless you're making your own food, you're getting a fair amount of those. Even in the healthy products, you flip it over and read it, there's canola oil in there, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, they'll call it all kinds of stuff, but stay away from that stuff. It's not what you need. Um, so anyway, that's also a component that outside of this video, sorry, I went off on a tangent there, but it's worth you understanding. So that's the vitamin D situation. As I've said at the end of all of these videos, well, I don't know if I even said this at the beginning, talk to your functional medicine practitioner.

(18:35)
If you're going to start any of these things. This is not specific medical advice for you, um, but talking to your regular family doctor or your regular MD might be a fool's errand. They are not always. Some are, but they are not always trained in nutrition. They don't understand the nuances of this. They are trained in pharmaceutical medication. You wouldn't want me trying to prescribe the pharmaceuticals that they prescribe. I'm not trained in that, and you would not want them handling your new nutrition like I'm trained. They're just two different skill sets. It's plumbers and electricians essentially, right? So you don't, you know, telling you to go, oh, talk to your plumber about this electrical issue before you do anything. It's, that's bad advice. Talk to your functional medicine practitioner, um, talk to your nutritionist, um, someone that understands supplementation, uh, and can look at your lab or can give you, uh, you know, an informed opinion on how much you should take, uh, and how often.

(19:27)
Okay? So that's the vitamin D discussion. Uh, call the office if you need vitamin D. You're welcome to order the designs for health. Uh, vitamin D from our website. Uh, again, the little link that says store in the upper right corner, dr krupka.com, but you can also get our, our contact information there and call the office and, and we'll set you up with that. If you need a vitamin D test, let us know. I think it's under 50 bucks to get that done. Uh, we use LabCorp, but LabCorp Quest, C P L, all the major labs will do it. Um, and, and, and even now, a lot of times your, your regular family doctor or your OBGYN will go ahead and draw that for you if you ask them to. It's becoming a much more, uh, mainstream test. They don't always know what to do with the result, but they're typically willing to, uh, order the test for you. All right? Otherwise, let us know if you have any problems or if you have any needs for that. And look around for the other videos for the foundational five where we go over multivitamins, fish oil, probiotics, and this one was vitamin D and then the next one is on magnesium. Have a great day.